I've been messing with Twitter.

In short, Twitter is used to send short (140 character) or less text messages from one person to....well, it could be anybody. One person or 10,000 people.

Originally, it was envisioned as a way for a group of friends to chitter-chatter about what they are doing at the moment...

"I'm at the mall"
"Going to see Indy Jones Movie"
"Will be @ fountain 2pm c u there"

and stuff like that.

The basic concept is that you either send a "tweet" (message) or "follow" someone's "tweets". So if you are the popular kid, when you tweet from your phone "going 2 get pizza @ jacks" maybe 20 other kids who "follow" his updates get a text message on their phone seconds after he sends it.

Silly, right?

Not so fast.

You see, along with the silly chatter, the idea of a large group communicating short, written messages, nearly instantly, with a low-bandwidth, high(er) reliability text message has some interesting applications in emergencies.

And so, the Los Angeles Fire Department started "tweeting" messages about brush fire situations. And LAFD firefighters started "following" the LAFD tweets.

And here you can see the tweets as they happen, with the web-based version of Twitter:

http://twitter.com/lafd

Example tweet:
*EXPLOSION* 1B LAX x Baggage Area 1; MAP 702-G5; FS 51; Reports of small explosion on Flyaway B... Read more at http://tinyurl.com/5a4rpn 02:05 PM September 03, 2008

Not to be left out of this is the Red Cross, with their own Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/redcross

and here's the latest Tweet from them (see the site above for the current link)

A hurricane watch has been issued for areas in GA, SC & NC. Officials as far north as D.C. urged residents to prep for heavy winds and rain.

(they also have a neat blog for updates, better than the tv news: http://hurricanehanna.wordpress.com/)

Now, remember that you can "follow" a Twitter user's announcements on your phone (or on your Twitter home page)? Well as a user, you can be "followed" or send a "direct message" to another user.

And that's something the Red Cross is doing as well - they are using Twitter for "health and welfare" traffic in affected areas.

All in all, it's a near tool with a lot of emergency management implications and uses. It solves a lot of problems in terms of user management and signup, and the mobile data services tend to work when voice does not.

Give it a try, it's nifty.